Save Article

Free Speech, Politics and Real Corporate Accountability

June 7, 2012 4:48 p.m. ET

One hundred and one companies, including more than half of the influential S&P 100, have adopted political transparency and accountability. They should be congratulated, not demeaned as they are in Kimberley Strassel's "The Corporate Disclosure Ruse" (Potomac Watch, June 1) and your May 31 editorial "Where Have All the Proxies Gone?" Their action is a tribute to good corporate governance. It demonstrates that political disclosure is becoming a mainstream corporate practice, protecting the interests of companies and their shareholders.

These companies recognize the risks of secret political spending. Secrecy invites corruption. They have sent a clear signal that they won't allow themselves to be extorted by political operatives for political contributions, and that they won't permit their reputations to be put at risk to further the political agenda of powerful officeholders. This is precisely the threat that companies now face when solicited by third-party advocacy organizations that raise money secretly but disclose to elected officials how companies have responded.

The Center for Political Accountability has not questioned that companies have the right to spend politically. Instead it has worked collaboratively with companies for the past nine years to assure transparency and accountability, practices that the Supreme Court in Citizens United v.Federal Election Commission found to be in the public interest.

Dan Bross, Microsoft's senior director of corporate citizenship, recently told the Washington Post, "As a company, we believe in openness, transparency and accountability. We are doing what we believe is right."

Bruce F. Freed

President

Center for Political Accountability

Washington

Ms. Strassel calls advocates of greater political transparency and disclosure members of "the growing liberal war against corporate free speech." Informed readers might ask whether she also considers the two-thirds of Americans who, according to a January CBS/New York Times poll, support limiting outside spending, to be members of that fringe movement. In the Citizens United decision, eight out of nine justices endorsed strong disclosure rules paired with "shareholder democracy," with only Justice Clarence Thomas rejecting disclosure rules using a version of Ms. Strassel's argument.

By criticizing the source—accusing everyone from labor unions to George Soros to the "liberal-party machine" of conspiring to muzzle corporations—transparency opponents seek to distract from a simple and previously bipartisan idea: Voters deserve to know who spends money in politics. Individuals' contributions are fully disclosed, and when companies with many times the spending power get involved in elections, the transparency imperative is even stronger.

Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D., Calif.)

Palo Alto, Calif.

I was a co-founder of the Center for Political Accountability and its president for four years. While I reluctantly concur with Ms. Strassel's depiction of the corporate shakedown that the CPA has essentially become, I am ultimately less bothered by its venality than by its irrelevance.

In its obsessive focus on the real or imagined sins of specific corporations, the CPA has completely missed the big picture. For example, the Zicklin Index, in which Mr. Freed takes such pride, rewards corporations for dotting their "i's" and crossing their "t's" with respect to internal monitoring. It doesn't even address the risk that the CPA identifies as the burning issue—corporate corruption dressed up as free speech. And it is not a useful instrument for looking at trade associations, super PACs and the other vehicles for indirect giving which is where the real money has been going since the Citizens United decision, which is inarguably the single most important development shaping the work that the CPA ostensibly exists to do. Yet since filing a perfunctory amicus brief, the CPA has had nothing of significance to say about it.

I fought to keep the CPA focused on its core objective but left in 2007 when it had become clear that substantive solutions took a back seat to showboating. Events since then have served to illustrate the urgency of the center's original mandate. When corporations transfer vast sums to the politicians responsible for regulating their activities through opaque schemes like super PACs, those contributions look like bribes, not protected speech. My former colleagues at the CPA have sadly chosen to pick the low-hanging fruit of corporate shakedowns, wrapped in the dogma of good governance. Meanwhile, much work remains to encourage shareholders to get their heads into the game and follow the money.